One night last week, when I thought the kids were asleep, I held up a holiday cookie tin to my husband. It depicted a scene from some bygone era of a bakery on a cobblestone street. The women wore long dresses and aprons. The men wore the crisp uniforms of their trades. All the people working were male, from the horse cart driver to the delivery boy, while all the women were either engaging in household chores or childcare or waiting for a man to do something for them. Every person in the scene was white. “This is what Trump’s cabinet wants America to look like,” I joked.
“What does Trump want America to look like?” my eight-year-old son called from down the hall, his bat ears picking up my comment.
Whoops. Once again I’d violated my own pledge not to discuss the current political situation in front of my son, a promise I’d made when his anxiety spiked during the campaign.
My son has always seemed more anxious than his older sister. When he was a toddler, I wasn’t able to leave him for a few hours at the rec center childcare center the way I had his sister. It panicked him. His anxiety first began to concern me when he was four and a massive flood damaged our house, his preschool, and our community. He spent weeks clinging to my leg as I tried to work from home, afraid to go anywhere by himself. I eventually took him to a play therapist, who explained to me how scary the world looked to him. “Sometimes this anxiety is caused by trauma,” he said, “but other kids just come into the world this way.”
I studied parenting books about highly sensitive and anxious children, and gradually learned to eliminate as many stressors as I could from his environment. The idea is that if you can make things calm at home, the child will be more relaxed and better able to cope outside the home, in places you can’t control.
One of the stressors in our house, I realized, was the news. I tried to keep from watching and listening to news in his presence. But as the 2016 presidential election ground on, I nervously consumed more news, and my son heard more than he should have.
My parents and much of my extended family are Republicans. I have chosen to avoid lecturing my kids about my very different political beliefs, but when they ask, I’ll answer. Still, my kids have heard me speak enough about being kind to others that I didn’t have to tell them what I thought about a man who makes fun of the disabled, insults women and minorities, and arouses white supremacist sentiments.
“What if Trump wins?” my son asked in October, with fear in his voice.
Foolish me, confident in the polls and in the judgment of my fellow Americans, said, “Don’t worry, he won’t.”
“But what if he does?”
On November 9th, when my children woke and learned that Trump had won, they cried. My husband works at a leading climate science research institute. What would happen to his job, my children asked, with climate change deniers in charge of the National Science Foundation budget? What would happen to the parents of their immigrant friends at school? For my ten-year-old daughter, what did it mean to be a girl growing up in a country whose leader had said such terrible things about women?
I didn’t have any good answers for them. For the first time in my life, I felt deeply anxious about the fate of my country. My college theology professor once explained Kierkegaard’s idea about the “leap of faith” not as a leap across a chasm, but as having the confidence that the ground would still be there when you landed after you jumped in the air. America, which had always seemed like steady ground beneath my feet, now quaked with potential calamity.
I found that the only way to ease my sense of dread and worry was to take political action with unprecedented fervor.
The only prior political action I’ve taken was to donate to NGOs such as UNICEF, volunteer with organizations that helped low-income children, and make a few phone calls about a local issue several years ago. But since the election, I’ve been calling my representatives, senators, and governor almost every week with my concerns. I’ve been signing petitions, and even created one to support a Mexican-immigrant instructor at my town’s rec center who was fired without warning, which led to me fielding calls from reporters and the more than 500 people who signed it.
Last month I attended my very first political salon, organized by a friend who invited a representative from a community organization that supports immigrants to speak about what meaningful actions we can take. I recently invited a handful of friends to form a mini-action group, following the model set out by the people who wrote, “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.”
However, I try to be careful to engage in all this activity, and get my news fix, when my son is asleep or at school.
My daughter, on the other hand, has always been interested in issues in the world. When she was eight, we read the biography of Malala Yousafzai together. On her own, she reads the news online, and she has researched and written a paper about the consequences of Hurricane Katrina for the poor people in that community. She has conducted science experiments about global warming, and with her class she wrote a letter to the mayor urging him to stop using coal as a source of our city’s electricity. During the campaign, when she heard the remarks Trump made about women, her jaw literally dropped. I took her with me to my friend’s political salon.
But even in my kid activist daughter, I sense her relief when she doesn’t have to think about the perils of a Donald Trump presidency. At my friend’s party, she drifted off from the adults talking political action to join the kids playing video games. Her full-time job is being a kid, and I need to guard that for her.
The charming 2003 German film Good Bye Lenin!, set in East Berlin in 1989, is about a young man named Alex whose mother suffers a near fatal heart attack after he’s arrested for participating in an anti-government demonstration. While she lies in a coma, the Berlin wall falls and Alex’s life changes as the West rushes in. When Alex’s mother wakes from her coma nine months later, the doctor warns Alex that any shock could cause her condition to deteriorate. So, to keep his bedridden mother alive, he pretends that communism never ended, reverting the apartment’s décor back to its earlier appearance and using old East German packaging to hide West German products.
My (admittedly imperfect) plan is to keep up something like this ruse in my household during the Trump years.
The kids don’t have to hear about any of the crazy things Trump tweets or watch whatever reality television pageant he enacts. In their presence I will leave the TV off. It won’t be easy — my son’s sensitivity seems to give him a kind of ESP for problems and conflicts in the world and even other people’s worry or anger. But, as I have so far during this parenting gig, I will try to do my best.
While I strive to reduce stressors for my son at home, I’ll keep working secretly to reduce stressors in our country, in the hopes of ensuring that a portrait of America must be one that continues to includes all of our friends, family, and neighbors.
